One of Britain's greatest living contemporary dramatists, Edward Bond is widely studied by schools and colleges. The collection includes a commentary by the author. In The War Plays (Red Black and Ignorant, The Tin Can People, Great Peace): Bond particularises daunting themes and subjects, but examines them within the context of every day life. His platform is a trilogy of plays that deal with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. The first, - a quick, telling chronicle of a life destroyed before it ever got lived - puts forth Bond's notions of contemporary cultural corruption and conditioning. In play two the demoralised inheritors of a ravaged earth try to rationalise an existence predicated on death. The third play enlarges the issues by focussing on a post-apocalyptic Mother Courage for whom schizoid suffering becomes a survival technique. (Time Out).